Have we come a long way, baby?

Australian women may have unrealistic expectations of the joys of sexual liberation, writes Bettina Arndt.

Wow! More than two-thirds of Australian women reached orgasm the last time they had sex. This finding, from the newly released "Australian Study of Health and Relationships", suggests that the "hit rate" for women has improved immensely over the past 30 years. We've come a long way, baby, to quote the famous Virginia Slim cigarette ad ... Or have we?

Whether sex actually is better for women isn't easy to sort out, because this new survey is the country's first representative national study to delve into these matters. But the limited Australian sex surveys dating back three decades show a distinctly less cheerful picture.

Robert Bell, a LaTrobe University sociologist, in 1974 surveyed a mere 1442 women (compared to the 9134 under the spotlight this time) and found only about half (47 per cent) said they reached orgasm all or most of the times they had sex.

This does suggest larger numbers of women are getting their rocks off. But a closer look at the new results shows a more complex pattern.

For instance, nearly a third of the women had, in the past year, been unable to climax (for more than a month), about half reported that they lacked interest in sex, more than a quarter said they did not find sex pleasurable, and a fifth reported experiencing pain during intercourse. So all is not so rosy.

But the overall picture does suggest Australian women's sexual liberation has paid off - particularly for mature women.

Here is the first good Australian evidence that women ripen sexually as they age. There's a steady drop in the proportions of women reporting difficulty climaxing between the ages of 16 and 49 - from 29 per cent to 25 per cent - followed by a leap to 42 per cent for women in their 50s - due, perhaps, to the hazards of menopause.

Similarly, the numbers of women experiencing pain during intercourse drop from 25 per cent to 15 per cent between the ages of 16 and 59, presumably because fewer older women have intercourse when they are not aroused.

The older women also worry less than the younger ones about whether their bodies look attractive during sex. Now that's something, isn't it? Our nipples may strive to shake hands with our navels, but we learn not to care (as much).

This is all good news, confirming as it does the age-old stereotypes of the confident, sexually mature older woman.

But this leaves many younger women doomed to worry and disappointment as their sex lives fail to live up to expectations. Fuelled by Sex and the City images of libidinous women emerging triumphant from tangled bedsheets, young women now expect the earth to move instantly and regularly.

But the fact is that women are slow starters, only rarely showing the capacity for sexual pleasure that young men have in abundance - the survey shows a significant gap between young men and young women when it comes to the likelihood that they will find sex extremely physically pleasurable.

According to Perth sexologist Dr Gabrielle Morrissey, who recently conducted research on early sexual experiences, one major reason for this difference is that some young women are still expecting their prince to awaken them.

While no longer lying back and thinking of England, many young women are ignorant about their bodies and reluctant to express their needs. "He'll know what to do," they confidently think ... and then wonder what went wrong.

It's enough to make this former sex therapist tear her hair out. More than 30 years ago I conducted research into the importance of masturbation for helping women learn to respond during sex. The benefits of this form of self-help are clear, but sadly it seems that the message has fallen on deaf ears. The new survey found that fewer than a quarter (23 per cent) of Australian women aged 16 to 19 say they have masturbated in the previous year.

Another intriguing result to emerge from this important survey is the thrill of early relationships for young men.

Overall, men are significantly more likely than women to rate their emotional and sexual relationships as extremely pleasurable, but it's the young men who report the biggest emotional and sexual charge from those early romances.

Sadly, however, it's downhill from then on, with fewer men and women giving their relationships such high ratings as time goes by, but most still reporting overall emotional and sexual satisfaction.

So are Australian men simply easier to please - or are women doing a better job at providing the pleasure? Both may be true, but it could also be that women's extraordinarily heightened expectations for their relationships and their unrealistic longing for sexual bliss and intimacy is depriving them of the levels of satisfaction men still manage to enjoy.